#47 Truth After the End of Progress

Hi all,

Busy times, and so much to analyse, talk about, and discuss. Especially in times of distress, we should take the time to reflect on our actions. What we definitely know is that clinging to our own positions and beliefs will not move the needle, especially if we don’t understand the other's perspective.

Many people are understandably preoccupied with other worries. As I read in a Dutch newspaper today, a journalist noted that, understandably, voters aren’t overly concerned about climate change; they’re more worried about whether they can still afford a house.

That might be true, but such reasoning will never help us avoid collapse.

Last week, I wrote about the dikes that are cracking. And they do. Because this week, we’ve seen new cracks appear in the political dikes that were supposed to hold back ecological collapse. On one side of the Atlantic, the Trump administration pushed to grant sweeping exemptions from sustainability regulations, effectively rolling back years of environmental protection. On the other side, in Brussels, the political right is gaining ground and seeking to weaken EU environmental rules.

I don’t get it. In the very same week when new scientific warnings about ecosystem breakdown emerged, we see policies that seem completely detached from reality.

However, perhaps that’s not the correct analysis. Maybe what we’re seeing is not ignorance, but the end of a particular kind of truth.

Perhaps what we are witnessing is not merely political blindness, but the collapse of a particular way of knowing. For decades, both policymakers and economists have operated within what philosopher Martin Savransky calls a “regime of futurity” — a shared belief that progress and growth could always extend the horizon of control. In this view, the future was open, rational, and manageable.

But as Savransky argues in his recent Futures article, that regime is breaking down.

The trouble with our times, to echo Paul Valéry’s (1988): 192) words from a century ago, “is that the future is not what it used to be.”

The Anthropocene — an age of irreversible planetary instability — no longer allows us to think of “the future” as a destination waiting to be engineered. It has become precarious, uncertain, and morally charged. The once-reassuring story of progress has lost its anchor.

This collapse of futurity is not only philosophical; it is also political and economic in nature. Our policy frameworks still act as if the world can be optimised through better models — more efficient markets, greener growth, more innovative technologies. But this technocratic certainty is itself the problem. It reduces reality to numbers while ignoring the relational, moral, and ecological dimensions of truth.

As I argued in my earlier Collapsology blog, collapse is not simply an event, but a mirror that shows us the limits of systems built on the illusion of endless control.

So, what might replace this collapsing regime of truth and progress?

A possible answer lies in the growing field of post-normal science, which accepts that “facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high, and decisions urgent.” It demands humility and inclusion. Inclusion of an extended peer community where scientists, citizens, and policymakers co-create knowledge rather than pretending to possess it.

This resonates with the recent Lancet Public Health paper on the Wellbeing Economy, which argues that our economic design (obsessed with growth) lies at the heart of today’s “polycrisis’ (an argument, of course, not unfamiliar to me). The Wellbeing Economy reframes success in terms of dignity, fairness, nature, and participation, rather than GDP. It’s not another growth model; it’s a new moral economy, one that values the future, nature, and care.

In other words, we need to rediscover truthfulness. Not the truth as mathematical inevitability, but as moral courage. The courage to act amid uncertainty, to listen to others, to doubt one’s own models, and to imagine a future that is shared, not owned.

If the dikes are cracking, it’s because the waters of reality no longer obey our projections. Truth in the age of collapse will not emerge from better equations, but from a rediscovery of humility, solidarity, and moral imagination — the capacity to stay with uncertainty and still care for the world.

For those who want to dive deeper into the ideas, the literature, and the philosophical undercurrents, please continue reading on my Substack (and, of course, I would appreciate it if you would).

Otherwise, the truest thing you can do right now is to close this page. Go to your social media if you must, but better yet, reach out to your family, friends, and neighbours. Or step outside for a while. Look around, breathe, feel, and think. That, too, is part of the work.